Letter: Should we test only the elite?

A letter a few days ago concerning the testing gap made several valid points, including the link between poverty and education.

To expand that point, this situation is often a vicious circle. Students living in poverty most often do not, for several reasons, have the vision to challenge themselves in school. The result is what I call a "minimum wage education." Thus the circle is completed, and the student enters young adulthood little better off than he was in kindergarten.

Another important element not ever discussed is the cultural difference in educational systems. Politicians and educational experts who have their own agenda choose to ignore this. To illustrate, while in Louisiana all high school graduates will be required to take the ACT, in Europe and Asia only the elite are tested. This amounts to comparing C and D students with only A students.

In Japan, for example, students study at school from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., preparing themselves specifically for huge academic college entrance exams. The pressure is so great that if they fail they often feel disgraced. The suicide rate among Japanese young people is very high.

When, however, have you heard of a great Japanese university?

In Europe most students are tracked in elementary school. One track is toward a career and the other is academic. I have two equally intelligent great-nieces who were educated in public schools in The Netherlands. One was not very interested in academics and was placed in a career track and graduated after the 11th grade. The other was academically aggressive, was placed an academic track, and graduated after the 12th grade.

What I am getting to is that only the student in the academic track took national achievement tests. The career student did not.

Consequently, American students across a broad sampling are being tested while in Europe and Asia only the highest academic college-bound students are being tested. It is not hard to figure out how America's all-inclusive testing will compare to the rest of the world's elitist testing systems.